Valeria Bruni Tedeschi
I villeggianti

When the gardener meets the head of the family, he kisses him and licks his ear, inside. Then occasionally he lies down in the mud, happy. The housekeeper harshly insults him, and he throws himself to the ground, devastated, telling her "You're mean!" like a child to a strict mother.

There are about fifteen characters in the latest film by the talented actress Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. There is the failed writer and director (Bruni Tedeschi), who cannot help but put her life in her films, there is her partner (Scamarcio) who continues to deceive her only to crush her, there is the sister (Golino) devastated by the death of the brother, about whom the protagonist would instead like to talk in her new work, and their mother who plays the piano and would like another kiss. There is the frustrated waiter, because he would have had all the abilities to study, but without a father... And the perverse scullery boy, the leftist writer, the ruthless secretary, the adopted child, the aspiring suicidal singer.

The attempt is to narrate the Fellini-esque lack of inspiration of a screenwriter (who is actually that of the director, and it would be easy to say it shows), but as someone wrote, Bruni Tedeschi is no Fellini. She fills the artistic and existential limbo with a potpourri of characters, stories, loves, quarrels, songs, and less-than-funny carnivals. The result is quantitatively notable, because for better or worse, the profiles that compose the mini-world residing in this villa on the French Riviera are sketched with some tasteful flair, beautiful only on the surface.

If anything, the problem emerges over the long run: the quantity compensates, or rather, would like to compensate for the absence of something truly significant to say. Bruni Tedeschi opens a thousand windows, sketches a thousand portraits, but then does not know what to do with those premises, and essentially throws them away, closes them, goes back, repeats the same patterns ad infinitum. As arid as its characters, alone and with nothing to give, the film can only live on the short interludes that the puppet-characters can create. But they have short breath, they quickly gasp.

It's easier to write fifteen characters and give each of them a piece of the film, rather than focusing on two or three, and delving into their problems, their wounds, their impulses. The film is almost childish at a cognitive level, passing nothing to the viewer, indeed, over time it bores because it cannot completely hide the mechanisms it uses to entertain. The ride comes off its hinges, and the result is boredom.

This is exemplified by the use of cyclic stratagems to divert from the lack of significant construct: the songs, the sex, the dips in the pool, the madness, the ghosts that come and go. It’s all cyclical, a social portrait that could also have been pleasant (and in part it is) if it had come to give a reading, a meaning, a true emotion, a point of view. But the keys to interpretation are banal, like "What is life without love?" or "the difference between right and left."

The music seems to emphasize the comedic, almost comic side, and in their repetitiveness, they accentuate the structural flaws of the film. Paradoxically, one waits for the joke or comic twist because evidently Bruni Tedeschi is still searching for the meanings of life. There, the disorientation is well rendered, inherent precisely in the film's flaws.

5.5